


A Good Enough Memory

by thedevilchicken



Category: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Fantasizing, Friends to Lovers, Friendship/Love, M/M, Memories, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 21:09:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7238575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It began when Jack caught him in a lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Good Enough Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lynndyre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/gifts).



> A magical realism take on movie-Stephen's capture by the French. Borrows from the books up to _HMS Surprise_.

It began when Jack caught him in a lie. 

It perhaps felt insignificant at the time, just an offhand note of a place in which Stephen most definitely could not have been and a time at which he most definitely could not have been there, just one line of conversation at the table in Jack's cabin aboard one ship of his or aboard another. A great many other men would have overlooked it most entirely, had they been there in Jack's place; either they would have noticed the fact not one jot at all or else marked the inaccuracy as a mere a slip of the tongue, or of the memory. Stephen thinks he should have known that Jack would not. For all his foibles and his blinkers and his earnestness, there are certain matters to which Jack attends quite closely.

For a man who can even now still name every part of a seafaring vessel right from stem to stern by dint of simple touch alone, a man indeed who can summon the names of those parts in their right order while half drunk and idling at not an inconsequential remove from both ship and sea, the slip was as evident as a ratline tied two inches off its mark: that was to say the foreign placement, while not perfectly apparent at first sight, would niggle at his seaman's brain. He looked at Stephen with a question but the conversation moved on swiftly under the luffing sails of their drunk midshipmen. Still, Stephen's every slip from that night on, no matter at all how minor he himself might have perceived its being, was another misplaced ratline in the rigging of Stephen Maturin's official history. If Jack had stared too long at it or too intently he was like to find there was actually no ship at all, just the gleaming brightwork of it. 

For months, quite near a year, Jack seized upon those slips just like a pack of hounds to which a country gent might ride, like a terrier nipping at the vicar's vestment because it smells the morning's bacon. Stephen paid the matter little mind as he had quite other work to attend to, and as such was the case he tightened up his own encryption though he still feels even now that the practice of it strained nigh intolerably upon their much-cherished friendship. But it was simple enough to tie up that thought, too, and tuck it out of sight besides, feeling the familiar tug of a thought displaced though he'd long since perfected that rarest of arts: letting that missing thought be without teasing at the space it had once occupied. That way madness lay, or else ruin, and Stephen knew his work. He has skill such as few others in his line possess. His mind is just as neatly fitted and maintained as any of Jack's ships.

After that slip, when they put in for stores or for some new refitting - or indeed for mail or to find out their further orders - Jack took to following him when he went ashore. As Jack, dear Jack, had not the slightest bit of stealth or guile or cunning in him that did not depend in its entirety upon his frigate or its crew, his movements were to Stephen most entirely obvious. Meetings were by necessity broken. Exchanges were delayed. Stephen's work began to suffer, though Jack could have had no notion that his actions were potentially a hindrance to their efforts in the war and he would, in point of fact, have been quite mortified had he discovered it; he wished only to understand his dear friend's most enigmatical behaviour. How Stephen wished and wishes that he could have told him then, that he could have sat him down in privacy and whispered to him, murmured to him, _Joy, I am a spy_. But such privacy was rare to them then in shipboard life and such an intimacy ran directly contrary to Stephen's clear-cut orders. Sir Joseph would know. It was and is, of course, Sir Joseph's job to know such things. 

Jack would have blustered at him, Stephen thinks, quite naturally so. His countenance would have turned ruddy beneath his deep, half-sunburned sailor's tan, all _You're no such thing and a damned fool for saying so_ and hands waved up in air. They both knew and know what the stiff, stark punishment would be for espionage, should such an agent of the crown be captured by the French, a punishment meted only after torture to the point of that agent's utter breaking. Sir Joseph had warned him there would be a price to pay for joining the corps; Stephen had had no close acquaintance then and had not counted upon making any. He'd had no notion of Jack, or that their friendship would blossom in the way it has. Of course, Jack had no malice in him then at all, nor has he ever; his love for Stephen was and is such that he never could have wished him any harm. The issue was that Jack's lack of guile left his mind quite abominably open to the other side's intrusions, and such a breach was to Stephen quite unthinkable. 

It was unthinkable. Until, quite naturally, the unthinkable chanced to occur. 

It had always been a possibility that Stephen would find himself in enemy hands, from the very first instant of his recruitment to the intelligence corps of Sir Joseph Blaine. Stephen had known this from the get-go, could hardly have been insensible to the fact given the climate of affairs there on the continent, not when he knew that climate well, and he considered that possibility to be a risk it was most worthwhile to take. He knew the schedule of events that would inevitably follow such a capture as he'd seen first-hand the nature of it practiced in a London cell upon an agent of the French; thought-breakers came only once the agent's body had been broken, to break the spirit down besides. They'd open up a man's head to peer inside, in the metaphorical of senses, and lay his every secret bare. Stephen's seen it done. To his shame, once or twice, Stephen's done it himself; Sir Joseph says it's the same as a sword, or a pistol, that it's just a weapon to use in the fight. It does not feel so, though he understands the logic.

Stephen was taken by the French. They meant to drain his memory, to sift through and discard the minutiae that made up his whole life and take the rest, what pertinent knowledge he had of England's plans, till there was nothing left to save. It had always been a possibility, and one for which Stephen had prepared most studiously, most assiduously: they broke his body in Mahon, but they did not break his mind. It was not for want of trying. The French breaker tried and tried until she bled.

Back aboard the _Lively_ , after, rescued, with concern writ large on Jack's dear face despite the smile he strained to paste there over it, that was when he broke apart. Jack sent away the others and he tended him alone, though Jack had never had the stomach for a surgeon's work, not even for the watching of it. Stephen could not speak then, such was his piteous condition, but in his distress and his exhaustion that mattered very little. There are other ways for men to speak, if they have the skill to, and Stephen's always had that skill built into the working of him - such skill is born, not made. And so, most unintentional, his mind pierced Jack's within his brittle haze of morphia; Jack startled with a cloth at Stephen's brow and clenched it, squeezed out bloodied water that ran over Stephen's face and stung his eyes. Jack quickly blotted it away and then went still, went quiet. 

Stephen lingered there, in that most dear of spaces, divorced almost entirely from his pain. Jack did not resist it, not after the first instinctive, reflexive instant. He didn't even try to.

To a reader of minds, to a taker of thoughts, every person's every thought has its own separate tenor, its own separate tone, its own quirk in its writing; each thought is like a phrase plucked from a tune or a line from a book. The ensemble of each person's thoughts - their memories, which lie beneath and take more skill to get to - strike together much like a piece of well-wrought music, like a well-writ set of books, though to an intruder those memories are rarely set in any logical order. Stephen's one of those whose premier skill's to browse through a person's surface thoughts, or read into their memories like a jumbled score or wander in them like a library that's system's all ahoo: he can read a man's most basic intentions from more than fifty feet away, or, with time, he can plunge himself deep inside that man's most closely-guarded memories and dig out one specific date, one time, one happening. He can pluck out thoughts steal them for himself once in there, excise them entirely if their owner should be insufficiently prepared for it and leave a space behind instead. He can tell a man's identity by the timbre of his mind; he doesn't need to see their face. 

He knows Jack's mind. He could single him out from a crowd of hundreds, Jack's dear earnest brain that's never sought to hide a thing from him. And in those few days after his rescue, while Stephen was not quite himself, it was Jack's mind in which he sought refuge. It was Jack's memories that he read like books in a library, that he played through like a borrowed score. It was Jack.

Then, Stephen's eyes fluttered open; Jack looked down at him, quite drawn, quite haggard. Even once withdrawn from in Jack's head, Stephen knew Jack understood the way that matters stood between them. He hadn't merely read the memories from in Jack's mind: without meaning to, and in direct contravention of his orders, he'd added to them. He'd read himself in, played his own music so that Jack knew everything that Stephen hadn't meant to tell him but had always wished to, to clear the air between them. It perhaps wasn't proper but he felt it was right, and if a rift should form between them then at least that was the truth of it, not just fancy brightwork on a make-believe boat. 

"You're one of them," Jack said, his voice hushed low. It wasn't the tone of awe some people had but also not quite disapproval, not quite betrayal, because Jack understood. From what Stephen had given him, there in his mind just like an extra volume to his library, he couldn't not.

"I am," said Stephen, hoarse and strained and wanting, although he knew he didn't have to say a word of it since it had all been said without a word at all. "I have been since before we met."

When he struggled to sit, Jack stooped down to help him do it. His strong, callused hands were warm at Stephen's aching arms, and he let them linger there a fraction longer than was strictly necessary to the task. 

"Have you been inside my head before, sir?" Jack said, stiffly, awkwardly, when that was done. "Have you taken thoughts from me?"

"Never!" Stephen exclaimed at that, dismayed, by way of his reply. "Never you, Jack. I could never consent to." He meant each word, because he felt quite sure he'd never do it. The exploration of thoughts comes naturally, non-invasively, a physician's fingers palpating lightly at the skin; penetration of the memory is a scalpel in the hand instead, to open up a wound; the taking of thoughts is wilful, wanton, gratuitous excision of a patient's healthy tissue. He had never intended to go even so far as to open Jack's mind; he could not and would not extract from it. He'd seen the effects that had on some men, the holes in their mind quite as treacherous as trapdoors.

"Perhaps you'd best take this memory away," Jack said then, abashed, quite low, quite clearly shaken. "Pretend I've never known it. For your safety." 

Stephen reached up one unsteady hand and set his palm there at Jack's cheek. "I've always wished for you to know but never been at liberty to tell you," he said. "I could take back memory, Jack, but I won't do it for myself. Perhaps it's time for me to teach you how to build defences up instead." 

Jack smiled, the expression faint but wholly true, and took Stephen's broken hand up gently between his two. "I'll never let it slip, you'll see," he said, exultant, then faltered for a moment. "Just I pray you don't delve too deep."

As Stephen's recovery began its slow progression, as the crew fussed about him anxiously as has always been their way, Jack began to learn; to Stephen's great surprise, he learned quite rapidly, the way he'd begun to learn his mathematics. They spent hours at it when Jack wasn't needed on deck above, closeted together there below, Stephen spelling out the ways in which one bars a thought-taker such as he is - or a thought-breaker such as he's not - from their entry. Anyone can be taught at least the rudiments and Stephen has since lobbied that Navy officers all learn, though he has his doubts that anything will come of it at all. The readers and takers and breakers are too few and far between, too precious a resource to waste on training, says the Admiralty, as it's not as they can conjure more than are born. They're more use in the field or in the prison cells. Anyone can be taught, but never once did Jack object to Stephen's presence there inside his head, even when his task was to repulse him. 

The inside of Stephen's mind is like a library, shelves all neatly rowed because he's had the time and the awareness, not to mention the ability, to order it that way. He's seen deep inside perhaps a hundred minds in his line of work and just as their surface thoughts have a variety of tones and textures, of expressive quirks and words and phrases that repeat as leitmotifs to reflect their thinker, so there are varieties in form to the places memories are stored. Some men's are libraries quite like his own; some are halls that echo with expressive music; Jack's varies with his mood. Sometimes he'll find him at the concert where they met, his thoughts and memories contained in the people who are listening or in the music in the air. Sometimes he'll find him in his past, at dinner with Nelson and the rest just like the tale he likes to tell, where memories are Admiralty logbooks. Sometimes, when Jack lets him in, it's the _Polychrest_ 's cabin or the deck of the _Surprise_ , or they're sitting up at the _Sophie_ 's maintop past the lubber's hole, with their legs dangling free and Stephen's knees turned just as wobbly as one of Killick's puddings. 

Other times, it's the Crown in Port Mahon, where Jack had stayed before the _Sophie_ ever sailed with him as captain, before the Peace of Amiens gave the island back to Spain. For those first months, as they sailed to their orders, as their missions progressed, the door to the inn remained closed to him. Stephen didn't force the lock; he didn't delve; he lingered there at the empty harbourside instead, and waited.

There are parts that people by necessity - or at least by some desire - keep from others in their lives. Stephen has yet to encounter even one man who says every word that he means to and whose words are ever what he means, whose interior is plain for all to see. Jack is the same, of course, for all his eager, earnest conversation, because all people are: in each and every moment wherein Stephen breached Jack's mind, there was a dark spot, a hidden spot, tucked down deep inside. That spot was hidden in the Crown, and one night Jack was waiting for him at its door. 

It was hardly a deep, dark secret, Stephen thought, bemused, as Jack led him up the stairs by candlelight in shirtsleeves, shielding the flame with his hand. It was hardly a secret like the one that Stephen had for so long, half-guilty under orders, kept from Jack. He'd heard it in Jack's thoughts over the years, in passing, quite without intention, quite without expectation that Jack would act upon it as he'd rather suspected that he never would. Frankly, without his skill at all Stephen was sure that he'd have noticed; it took neither a physician nor a naturalist, nor indeed a taker of thoughts, to see Jack's interest.

They reached the top of the stair and Jack pushed open the door to the room he'd kept there, pushed it open with a squeak of the hinge so Stephen could see himself inside there on the rumpled little bed with quite another Jack, so Stephen could see what Jack had desired for so long to hide. They lay together in a tangle of limbs in the flickering light, stripped bare, their contrasting anatomies rendering the image there quite interesting indeed. Stephen lingered by the doorway, watching their two bodies move. His eye, he must admit, was not quite clinical.

After a moment, he went into the room. He went over to the bed while Jack stood by in the doorway and watched him. The long hair of Jack's fantastical double was loose about his shoulders as he pressed his mouth to the crook of Stephen's double's neck, and Stephen could see his own Jack's eyes go wide when he reached out and trailed his fingers down the curve of the fantasy's spine. When that other Jack came up on his knees on the bed to look up at him, Stephen's fingers moved to comb back through his yellow hair. He pressed a kiss to the other Jack's warm forehead, then one to each cheek, then to his mouth. 

"Don't think you need to keep this hidden from me, Jack," Stephen told him, told the one there on his knees and then glanced back at the one that still lingered there in the doorway. The second iteration of Stephen himself quickly ceased to be and vanished, as fantasies are wont to do. He stood by the bed and he kissed that other Jack, ran his fingers over his bare skin, found the hard and heavy member that hung between his thighs and stroked with none of his customary clinical detachment. He didn't feel detached. He no longer had a need to be; Jack had let him in. That last dark spot was now illuminated, lamplight on weather-beaten skin.

"Don't it give you a fright?" the Jack in the doorway asked, amazed. 

"Nothing of the kind, as you can see," Stephen replied, and continued then to demonstrate indeed how very little the situation frightened him. Jack smiled. Jack watched. And then Jack's mouth found his as he replaced his double there at Stephen's side. 

There have been other ships since then and Stephen's noted the odd frequency with which a Navy captain switches berths. There have been other adventures that have taken them across the globe, other orders, dressings-down and tragedies. Stephen undertakes his work and Jack's been tested on occasion on the matter; Sir Joseph frowned upon the two of them quite vastly when they met in town, Stephen free of censure as his admissions in his fevered state had been quite understandable, and by then Jack had learned enough from Stephen that there was no further need to take his memories away. Stephen could have done it but he wouldn't have; he knows what penalties he'd have faced for disregarding orders, but his Jack's so dear to him he could never turn traitor and betray him, except perhaps for his own good. They're both tied to their work, but to each other first and foremost. Somehow that makes them stronger even when it makes them weak.

There have been ships since then and more missions than either one of them would care to count should they be asked to. Stephen's pried into a dozen brains to tease out all their mysteries, to take them, use them, hoping one day there'll be peace and he can give that up. Still, one mind needs no prying into: Jack's. 

So in the calm of night between struck bells, Stephen's met at the door there in a Mahon that's not Mahon where they're the only souls living. Jack's surer now, and bolder, and smiles when they undress. And when Jack's in him, when they're breathless and their bodies slick with sweat, it's as real as any memory. It's the privacy, the intimacy, that they can't have at sea. They'll do this long after the war ends, Stephen thinks because Jack thinks it. He finds Jack's optimism quite infectious.

It began when Jack caught him in a lie. Stephen's not so naïve as to believe there'll never be another one, but it's his hope that they'll now be few and far between.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a quote by Abraham Lincoln: "No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar".


End file.
